


Os

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [6]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:26:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>An Anglo Saxon Goddess of the Dawn who may or may not have been made up by the Venerable<br/>Bede as a part of his History of Britain.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Os

**Author's Note:**

> An Anglo Saxon Goddess of the Dawn who may or may not have been made up by the Venerable  
> Bede as a part of his History of Britain.

 4.10pm on a summer day in Toronto and the world grinds to a halt. At ground level pedestrians barely notice. The music stops blaring from shop fronts. Traffic signals flicker and die. No power. Under the ground, things are worse and passengers come spilling out of subway carriages and start to feel their way light-wards, hand in hand. The power clicks off from here to New York City and, whether they call her Os or Ostara or Easter what she has always known is this: that the dark has never been for her.

 

Eight hours till midnight.

 

She makes her way slowly through the strange and sticky streets. People stand around talking. As it grows steadily hotter and darker, the parks between the streets fill up with noise and candlelight. Nobody entirely wants to be alone. Pink cotton dampens and sticks against her skin. Under her blouse, a tattoo of raspberries and blooming flowers uses her spine as a growing cane. She bends, on the pretence of tying a shoe that she isn’t wearing, and there, sprouting from the hard-packed dirt, a pink flower grows. She promises that the girl who picks it will be married within a year. Long ago, before any Beade, they used to call her the Lady of the Dawn. These are her gifts to be given. A footnote, a slip of a pen, maybe, but belief lends power.

 

She walks along Yonge Street, the longest street in the world, no noise from the subway vents, the trains all stopped. The heat is oppressive, sticking her gold hair against her cheek in sweaty curls. In every park she passes a tree bursts into violent bloom. She bleeds life. She passes a couple of teenagers kissing on a bench. She pauses for long enough to give them both a dream of a long and happy future. The road heats until it’s almost too hot to walk on. She tilts her head back and looks up at the violet sky. A bird swoops and dips, outlined in black like something made by a child for an art project.

 

What she likes best about this city (and she has been to all cities, anywhere somebody saw the dawn for the first time) is that it can be anywhere, at any time. They film movies here for that very reason; the brownstones can be New York or Chicago and rarely are called upon to be themselves. To-ron-to, which was _tkaronto_ the first time she came here, with the first men on the first ships and it was like the trees had bowed to her, trailing the long fingers of their branches in the still water of the lake. She had gathered her skirts and curtsied back, little Goddess in a new-old country. She came to like this place, these Americas, where the lights never really went out.

 

So perhaps it makes sense that all of them would one day go out at once, just like that.

 

She’s made it down to the lake by the time the stars come out. Tonight, even in the heart of the city, you can see them. The nights have never been hers, but she’s always thought of the stars as sisters, and she’s known all of their names. She sits down on the concrete in the middle of a scrubby parking lot close to the water’s edge and she blows a kiss to the Milky Way. _Beautiful, aren’t they_ , says a boy too self-conscious to be handsome. _I miss them when I’m in the city._ He tells her that he’s from the place in the middle of the country, the flat prairie land where, sometimes, you can see the Northern Lights if you’re lucky and it's cold outside. She doesn’t have the words to tell him about all of the things which she has come to miss. Instead, she tells him that there are places in the world where they believe that the Northern Lights are swirling skirts and that everything comes down to dancing in the end. She draws her legs up, crossed, and then she leans in and cups his face with both hands and kisses him. Plants and people are not so very different; it all comes down to water in the end, and water is thinner than blood and covers seventy percent of the planet. Flowers bloom for her, and he isn’t so very different on a biological level. She just has to whisper to the water in him. _Life_ , she whispers. _Keep growing_.

 

When she pulls back from him, he’s staring at her and she leans back against him, her back against his chest, and she closes her eyes and she can feel the sun on the other side of the planet, beating like a heart. Night-time has never been for her but she feels the dawn in her fingertips and the sun has always risen because she told it that it could. It would have risen without her, probably, but the meaning would have changed.

 

In the parks and on the corners, the candles burn on through the hot, dark night like a scattering of stars.

 


End file.
